"What If ?" Is Such a Waste

It's a very hot night in Los Angeles, at least indoors. The heat of the day isn't leaving my apartment so I have turned on the air conditioner. Oddly, though, it is cool enough (but humid for California) to sit outside in a soupcon breeze. I came out here to write. But then I found myself unable to begin. That happens often, but mostly because I cannot settle on a direction. Tonight, I have a direction, or a continuation of one that finds itself weaving through my blog, but one that seems to discomfit some of my friends who kindly read my words here. As to them it will come no surprise, I tend to write a lot about life and death. I think they (and others perhaps) assume that this focus comes from depression. Heck, I have been depressed more times than I can count, but my preoccupations in these pages isn't derived from sadness. It's just kind of not wanting to ignore what is plainly around me to be reckoned with, and in the reckoning, in an odd sense the hope that finally I will leave behind that fear and anxiety that has been too often an obstructive companion and kept me, to here, from many ordinary adventures. Hard to explain. We all deal with scary "what-ifs" in our lives, but I have carried my "what-iffing" to being a frozen figure on a plateau while others have courageously moved beyond me in what might even be considered basics, things like love, and family. They were willing, to paraphrase some line in one of my favorite movies, "Shadowlands" to take the pain with the joy. I often wasn't. Oh, I didn't avoid the pain. I just missed the joy.  I have noticed that Providence thus has placed certain things in my path, over I should tell you my vociferous objections, to get me out of speculative worry to face, to embrace, real life in all its facets. I have been so busy with the "what-ifs" that I ran before I engaged in far too much.




So what got me thinking about all this yet again? Well, two things, but I'll mention the first, and leave the second, a play I saw today, called "Constellations" to another entry. Maybe.

I was visiting my elderly friend as I do two to three times a week at a nursing home in Culver City. One of the Carmelite sisters was giving a presentation to a group of residents, and my friend was among them. I don't know that she recognized me immediately--I sense of late she doesn't always-- or maybe she didn't see me come in, but I didn't want to interrupt the proceedings, so I sat a short way off.  I noticed a new resident. She was clearly agitated, and trying to get up, though not steady on her feet, from her wheel chair. Sister managed to continue her presentation while attempting to soothe the woman by sympathetically caressing her back, but the woman's tears required a nurse to attend to her. She was taken to the nurses station which I could see from my vantage point, and she was no more calmed by their presence and ministrations. I could hear her asking to be taken to someone, I guessed a family member, who was not there. Probably, like so many of the residents, like my friend, she has dementia and is no longer able to care for herself and depending on its manifestations, neither is her family able any longer to take care of her. She shook all over as she cried to be rescued. from what is one of the possible inevitabilities of becoming ill. The staff tried to comfort her, to no avail. I felt for the nurses, as well as the woman.  Sometimes it just isn't all right, and nothing can make it so.

Each of us, if we don't die young, and quick, has to face the possibility that this might happen to us. I found it surprising that though it occurred to me that at some point in the not so distant future, I could be a new resident in a place like this, being led, as the Bible says to where I do not wish to go, I did not have an attack of the "what ifs".  I did book mark it in my head. I did also wonder that since I have been much of my life alone, and much of it, despite my often gregarious demeanor, a loner, whether I would seek rescue from an outside human source--even if I were compromised by dementia.

I am having a hard time with this entry. Not sure why. I think I am saying that I spent the first two thirds of my life worrying about things that might happen but were no where on the horizon. Now there are things most definitely on the horizon, and I am getting a preview, and somehow that jolt of reality is finally wrenching me from my old habit of "what-if", into more of a "What are you going to do now?" mode.  Maybe.

More than twenty years ago, someone I greatly respected. and trusted, exhausted himself in trying to get me away from my crippling "what-ifs" asked me that very phrase, "What are you going to do Djinna?" Before that, my father tried to logic me out of my cyclical thinking. They both hung in with me until, well, they died.  I spun my wheels. It's getting a little late in the day to keep spinning my wheels.

If spending time in a care home doesn't motivate me to deal with what is real, not potentialities I fear, then nothing will.